Imagine you have a table with millions of rows. It’s not a good idea showing all these data in a grid or similar, and it doesn’t matter you’re developing a web or desktop application… It’s not a good idea at all.

In these cases we should use conditional filters applied in the data source (usually a database) to get part of the information and return only the rows that match with the specified criteria. Using this technique the amount of network traffic could be reduced to a hundreds of rows or less, depending on the criteria.

There are different ways of accomplish that, but today I’d like to focus on apply this technique using a control from the DevExpress suite: The Filter Editor control.

As you can see the control looks nice, and it’s quite simple to use: You just need to link this control to another (usually a Grid or Tree), and automatically will retrieve the columns and values information from the source control. Then you’ll be able to filter the linked control and get a filter string which you can reuse later in other controls of the suite.

However the previous filter has the disadvantage that is a client filter, and is applied after we retrieve all the rows from the data source, not before. Our goal have to be apply the filter before getting the information.

Today I’ve been playing a little bit with this control, using a SQL Server database that contains a products table with 3.7 million rows and Entity Framework 6.0 as an ORM.

Note: For this test I’d like to use a SQL Tabled-Valued Function to access the data instead of using the default DbSet, because it’s supposed that I’ve to do some hard calculations inside the function. But you can also use the EF DbSet directly, as usual.

Now our goal here is:

Create at runtime a filter over the Products table using the filter control.

Parse that filter string and adapt it to the EF syntax.

Append the filter to the mapped function (thx to IQueryable!) before execution.

Finally, execute the filtered query against the data source

First we need to add an EF designer (we won’t use Code First because we’re going to map a Tabled valued function with is not supported). And add the table Products and the GetAllProducts function.

In our form, we just need to add a couple of Devexpress controls: A GridControl and a FilterControl, linked using the FilterControl SourceControl property (this allows the filter control to retrieve the names and data types of the grid columns).

Then we’ll add three buttons. The first one will retrieve the first 25.000 rows from the database (previously I’ve tried to get all rows from table, but the app crashed with an OutOfMemory exception ;))

The second button (this is the interesting one) will execute the current filter from the FilterControl.

Let’s code:

The first button is really simple. It’s just a query over the GetAllProducts function adding a where clause which will be resolved later (because EF is based on IQueryable<T>) when calling ToListAsync method.

For the second button we need something more. Something that allows us to translate the filter into a valid where clause, and append it to the function. The good news are that this functionality is provided natively by Devexpress:

Clean and simple. The first one creates a converter for translating the filter into EF syntax, while the second one appends the filter to the EF function using the previous converter.
And finally, here’s the SQL in the profiler. Exactly what I’ve expected.

So well… if you’re using Devexpress in your current project there’re no excuses for not including dynamic filters that user can save and reuse at runtime, uh? :P

Happy coding!

Bonus

The third button code shows how to get the TSQL syntax from the Filter control, that you can use it to query the database directly ;)